Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Tint Installed, and Dyno Baseline

As I mentioned previously in my mods plan post, window tint is one of the first modifications on my list. It looks good, keeps the interior cooler in the summer, and makes items inside the car less obvious to snooping thieves. We had our friends from TNT Tint come and tint the windows of our 335i. We've used TNT for many years, and have always been happy with the work. The tint material is charcoal non-metallic film from Madico. The result is shown here.

In anticipation of getting a dyno result for the Cobb AccessPort, we strapped the 335i to the Dynojet chassis dyno for some baseline (pre-modifications) numbers. The car put down 266 whp and 278 ft-lbs of torque to the rear wheels. That's pretty standard for a 335i, but a little higher than we'd expect for a car with 300 crank horsepower. Our usual rule of thumb is a 15% drivetrain loss for a 2WD car, so most cars with 300 crank hp would put down about 255 to the wheels.
When we tried to apply the AccessPort tune, we were denied -- the AccessPort wasn't yet programmed with our car's particular ROM, so we have to wait until the engineers at Cobb Tuning update the AccessPort so it can work with our vehicle.

Turns out the AccessPort has a handy utility built-in to make it easy to send your ROM file back to Cobb Tuning. If the AccessPort does not recognize your ECU, it'll pop up an option to download the ROM to the AccessPort. Select that, wait a few minutes, and then hook the AccessPort up to your PC. The ROM file can be downloaded and sent off to Cobb's tuners.

Once the file is back here we'll reflash the car and get some revised dyno numbers. Watch this space.